


kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again

by hipsterchrist



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alzheimer's Disease, Battle of New York, Dementia, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-18 20:01:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1441027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hipsterchrist/pseuds/hipsterchrist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Peggy Carter remembered Steve Rogers and one time she didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again

v. 

It takes Steve a shamefully long time to come visit her, even then. But when he finally does, he brings flowers, wears a smile that takes her back seventy years. He offers to wheel her into her private room, but she insists on standing, on walking arm in arm with him. She’d never gotten around to it before. Steve knows better, still, than to try to talk her out of it.

She shows him the photos of her children, debriefs him on their lives, on her own. There was the end of the war, and then there was SHIELD, and then there was a family, and still there was SHIELD, if only a little, and now she is here. Steve asks why she’s in a place like this, why she isn’t at a home of her own.

His face doesn’t change when she says the word. It makes sense - in the 1930s, he hadn’t known anyone who lived to be old enough to get a diagnosis. She’s grown so accustomed to the pity that floods people’s expressions when they learn; it’s comforting to have the opportunity to explain it on her own terms. 

He says, “Peggy, that’s awful,” and she shrugs, as much as her weary body will let her.

“That’s life, Steve.” She gestures to the table in the corner by the open window. “Play me a game of checkers? You can tell me what you’ve been up to, besides cavorting with the inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys.”

It’s a reference he doesn’t understand, and she can’t remember enough to explain it.

iv. 

She’s in the recreation hall when it happens. She sees it over the top of the newspaper she’s been trying to read, frustrated with the way the letters shift suddenly and refuse to form sensible words, lets it settle askew in her lap when the images and sounds on the television in front of her become clear. 

“Gladys,” she says, elbowing the woman next to her. “Turn it up, will you?” But Gladys continues to sleep, and Peggy reaches over her to fetch the remote, increasing the volume far above what is typically allowed with so many other people in the room.

New York is being attacked by what the news is calling aliens, and she’s sure that’s not quite right, but she doesn’t know what else to call them. They look like something Howard would’ve made as a joke, before he stopped joking, before she ever really knew him, but she can still easily picture him crafting some sort of robotic centipede and terrorizing Maria with it, bringing some weird little metallic action figure along on their double dates and trying to get a reaction from her as she sat across the table next to her guy, fiancé, husband. Buildings are being destroyed, people running through the streets, but there are a few people in the midst of the chaos, steadfast and colorful, shooting guns and arrows, determination set on their faces. She recognizes one of them, the only one whose face she can’t actually see, head to toe in deep red and shiny gold, knows it’s Tony, Howard’s little boy, all grown up and saving the world. She’s not surprised to see him here; he’s always getting himself involved in messes like this. The others, she doesn’t know, except.

Except Steve, wearing a new suit in the same old colors, knocking these creatures aside with his shield like they’re nothing, like he’d knocked aside Nazis and HYDRA agents over and over, seventy years ago, before he’d died. But Steve isn’t dead. Steve is alive, Steve has come back, somehow, and she doesn’t realize she’s crying until she feels the collar of her gown dampening. 

She watches in tears, terrified that she’ll lose him again, that she’ll actually have to watch Steve die this time instead of just hear it. A ginger-haired woman in all black makes the mysterious portal disappear, and Tony Stark takes a bomb into space and falls back to earth, caught by a hulking green giant of a thing, and Steve doesn’t die. 

There’s a hand on her shoulder, one of the nurses asking her if she’s okay, if she needs anything. She wipes her eyes and sets her jaw. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, contact SHIELD and tell them I need Steve Rogers’ phone number. If they give you any trouble, then you tell them that I will come there myself if I have to, and you remind them that I helped found the place.”

She calls before she forgets, writes down the number to her room’s line so she doesn’t have to concern herself with remembering that, too, and after a digital voice tells her to leave a message, she says, “Steve. Steve, this is Peggy. I saw what you did in New York today.” She pauses. She thinks that perhaps she should have written this all down, everything she wants to say, but then realizes it’s too much anyway, too long for one voicemail, especially these days, so she says the first thing that comes to her mind. “How _dare_ you come back and not call me?!”

iii. 

Tony is six years old when she meets him. Howard’s kept in touch with her, but it’s different now, both of them with families of their own, each working in a different SHIELD office, neither of them ever in the same city at the same time for years. They’re both in Orlando for the same three days now, though, and Howard’s brought Tony because Maria is visiting her mother. Howard has business meetings scheduled all day, begs her to babysit Tony, says he’ll pay for fondue for her later, like he never got around to doing before.

“Take him to Disney World,” he suggests, shrugging dismissively. “Or, hell, just stay in the hotel suite with him and watch cartoons.”

The truth is that she doesn’t really know how to relate to children. It was a struggle with even her own, for awhile, and she still sometimes catches herself speaking to her teenagers as if they’re forty years old. But she saw a comic book in Tony’s backpack when they all checked in at the front desk, and she can handles kids who like comic books.

Tony gasps in the backseat of the rental, tiny hands smudging the windows as he tries to make himself taller, leaning up to see better. “Are we goin’ to a comic book store, Mrs. Carter?” he asks.

“Tony,” she says, “if you stop calling me ‘Mrs. Carter’ and start calling me ‘Peggy,’ I’ll buy you all the comic books you want.” She was going to buy him all the comic books he wanted anyway, but she’s asked him twice now to call her by her first name, and it’s just not sticking. 

Tony runs around the shop, shelf to shelf, sitting on the floor and rifling through boxes of dusty old issues. He hands her the ones he wants, in stacks of two or three, before running back to look for more. There’s no rhyme or reason to the comics in her hands, and she stops paying attention after Tony’s fourth delivery, but then he holds up one that makes her breath catch. 

“It’s a special bicentennial issue!” he says, excited and rushed and still not stumbling over the words at all as they tumble out of his genius mouth. Then he bites his bottom lip, slumps his shoulders some, and quietly says, “I’m sorry, Peggy.” She blinks, rapidly, looks at the boy in front of her instead of the cartoon man on the front cover.

“For what, dear?” she asks. 

“My, um,” he starts, nervous and guilty. She thinks Howard must really be pushing the social skills thing. “My dad says that you knew him.” A tiny finger points to the man in the star-spangled suit on the cover, lingers over the ridiculous little wings attached to Captain America’s cowl. “My dad says that he knew him, too, but it makes him sad. So I thought...I thought it might make you sad, too.”

She holds the comics close to her chest, ruffles Tony’s hair with her free hand. “It does make me sad sometimes,” she admits. “Does your dad talk about him a lot?”

Tony nods. “But only when I don’t bring it up. If I bring it up, he gets mad. Or, well, my mom says ‘sad,’ and that’s true, I guess, but he gets mad at me, for making him get sad.”

She smiles, hopes it’s happier than she feels right now. “I’ll tell you what,” she says. “Let’s buy these, and then I’ll take you out for waffles, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know about Steve Rogers.”

Tony’s grin is missing a tooth, but it’s the happiest she’s ever seen him look, even in pictures. “Really?!” he asks. “Ya mean it?”

“I mean it.”

ii. 

It’s their tenth trip and she doesn’t want to go.

Howard swears this is the one, “This is the year, Peggy, we’re gonna find him this time,” pulls her suitcase from the hall closet and throws it open across her bed. “And look, I know I’ve said that before, I know it, but this time, Peggy, this time I really mean it.” He goes to her dresser drawers, starts tossing blouses and skirts into the suitcase, makes a big show of covering his eyes with one hand while grabbing out underwear with the other. 

“Howard,” she says. It’s softer than she intended.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, stepping away from the dresser, dropping a handful of silk. “I’ll let you pack the good stuff. Hey, you need help choosing? You could model some for me.”

“Howard,” she says again, still too soft. But he knows what it means, she can tell by the way his shoulders fall, the way he turns his back to her. 

“Peggy,” he says. She can hardly hear him. “Peggy, _please_. I--I know that it’s hard, I know how difficult it is for you, but I can’t. I can’t go it alone.”

“So don’t go,” she says. She barely recognizes her own voice. It sounds broken. Howard turns to look at her now, eyes angry.

“And just give up on him?” he demands.

“No,” she says. “Let your team search for him, and if they find him--”

“When they find him,” he corrects, snapping, “and this time, they will.”

“If they find him,” she says, “then they’ll have nothing but a body to bring back to us, nothing but bones. It’s nothing either of us need to be present to see.”

The silence is heavy, bearing down on her, and she’s ready for Howard to break it with something hurtful and angry again, but instead he sits down next to her on the bed, gingerly as Howard Stark does anything, and takes her hand. 

“ _Please_ ,” he says again. “Just this one last time. Steve...he lost Erskine and Barnes while he was alive. You and me, Peggy, we’re all he’s got left now that he’s not.” He rubs the heel of his hand against his eye, hard, and she says nothing, just squeezes his hand. “This can be our farewell to him. Look, it’ll be my last one, too. Ten years, ten excavations. Please.”

She closes her eyes, digs her fingernails into the back of his hand. “Last one,” she says, and it’s just a whisper.

i. 

A week from Saturday, 8 o’clock on the dot, and she’s at the Stork Club. 

She’s uncomfortable here, rubbing unintentional elbows with glamorous Hollywood stars and the wealthiest businessmen in the country. It reeks of cigarette smoke and she’s underdressed, even in her best evening gown. Couples are smiling, laughing, kissing, dancing, and she thinks she might vomit at the bar.

A woman sits down next to her and looks at her once, twice, before saying, loud and grating, “Say, do I know you?” 

“No,” she says. 

“Sure I do,” the woman says. “Ya look so familiar, it can’t just be nothin’.”

She says nothing. 

“Ya look just like that one dame, ya know, in Captain America’s compass.” Her heart breaks as the woman laughs. “I wouldn’t mind Captain America keeping me in ‘is compass.”

She stands, says, “Nice meeting you,” even though it’s a lie, and as she exits, she can hear the woman gasping, exclaiming to anyone around her that she’d just been talking to the girl in Captain America’s compass, and “Would ya believe it?! Right here in the Stork Club!”

The air outside is cool on her face, the brick wall harsh against her back through the material of her dress. She takes a breath, prepares herself to cry, but begins laughing instead. She doubles over, unladylike and uncaring, and when she finally regains control of herself, she leans her head back, rests it on the wall behind her. “Steve would have hated it in there.”

\+ i.

A man on the news is getting arrested at gunpoint. 

“Peggy,” Gladys says, digging a bony elbow into her side. “Isn’t that that fella you know? The one who visits you sometimes?”

She looks up from her newspaper. The man is on his knees in the street, hands on his head. He looks lost. 

“No,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him at all.”

“Hmm,” Gladys says. “I must be misremembering again. You know I’m no good with faces.”

She nods, eyes still focused on the television. “Who’d they say is arresting him? They don’t look like the usual police.”

“SHIELD agents,” Gladys says, “which would be helpful if I knew what ‘SHIELD’ was.”

“Boy, he’s made a right mess of things in that street, hasn’t he?” she says. “Well, whoever SHIELD is, it’s clearly a good thing they’ve caught him.”

Gladys agrees.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "It's Been a Long, Long Time," sung by many people (my personal favorite being Kitty Kallen), and heard on Steve Rogers' record player in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" as recorded by Harry James.


End file.
